Animatic Storyboard

I drew the animatic storyboard onto printed grids and then annotated key scene actions and technical details. After this I scanned in the storyboards onto my laptop and used Photoshop to edit each individual shot by cropping, straightening and boldening the pencil lines. I then combined voiceovers recorded using my iPhone with the shot images, onto Final Cut Pro and stitched the sequence together in order along with titles and transitions between each one. Below is the final video and the processes used to construct this animatic storyboard. We are yet to finalise our ending as we have various ideas to decide upon. We will update the blog post with our ending at a later date. Although this storyboard has been created, we may stray from shot types when actually filming as new or better ideas and scenes may happen on the day.

Using my iPad to read the written script and my phone's voice memo tool to record voiceovers in prep for the animatic storyboard video.

PLEASE CLICK ON THE PHOTOS TO ENLARGE THEM TO MAKE TEXT LEGIBLE

Print screen of using Final Cut Pro to construct all the elements together

Soundtrack Copyright is Yiruma - River Flows Into You

Our Foley Sounds

ADD ALL FOLEY SOUNDS HERE VIA CHIRBIT

Myself and Ellie went around with our iPhones to collect various foley sounds during filming. We collected sounds such as train doors closing, Poppy's footsteps, train announcements, general London business etc so that we have our own sounds to use alongside a soundtrack in our film.

Foley Sound #1. Train doors shutting and closing (twice), general chatter, and train announcements. [NOTE to group: best parts 34 secs to 50 secs]

Either use the QR code to scan and listen to the recording or use the Chirbit software tool to play.





ADD ALL FOLEY SOUNDS HERE

Filming - Day 1. Saturday 15th February

Communicating via our private Facebook page to ensure we all have the correct props ready due to the fact we are travelling to a far location to film

Shot list and Day Schedule

Photo collage made using Fotor. Showing images of us filming, directing, discussing and collecting foley sounds.

Location shots showing a glimpse of our film setting

-COLLECTION OF ALL ORIGINAL SHOTS

Character Analysis - why did we choose these actors in particular?

Below are the analyses for why we chose Ryan and Poppy to be our actors.

Character Analysis ryan

Character analysis- Poppy

Pitch and Presentation

Media Pitch- Film Noir - "Identity"

Filming permission

Before heading to London to film in our first key location of Kings Cross train station, we emailed a contact address given by the National Rail Enquiries regarding the use of filming in their station. We don't expect to get a reply back but if asked or interrupted by a member of staff, we can prove that we have at least attempted to ask for permission. If we have any problems on the day with stations or officers not wanting us to film for any particular reason, we will simply move on elsewhere and adapt our scenes.

Font Research and Analysis

I used a collection of software programmes to produce the following video. I used Final Cut Pro to construct the videos, images and clips together, Photoshop to produce the block images of the titles, SmartConverter and Adobe Premier Pro. N.B The first 10 seconds of the below video NOT my own, I got the animation from elsewhere but the rest was all produce by myself. 

 

Storyboard shot 9

Storyboard shot 10

 ^Where our title will appear in our film. ^

Using a tablet Application called "A Beautiful Mess" I decided to experiment with different fonts on my iPad using our film noir title 'Identity'. This enabled me to produce some first ideas, not necessarily final ideas, however it has given me inspiration for design ideas for the ancillary tasks. I kept to minimalist colours of black, white, grey and red to conform to the classic simple noir [and neo noir] colour ideologies. We can integrate these fonts in the opening titles as mentioned in the video.

This is simple yet effective. This sans serif font is eye catching due to its capital letters and bold, diagonal positioning. I deliberately stretched the text so that the 'I' and the 'Y' both bled into the corners of the image, almost to act as a visual metaphor that identity can be concealed. The colours are minimal and not too overwhelming; further aiding focus on the title.

For this font, I particularly like the broken lines which could connote the broken relationship between the husband and Blake. Or it could symbolise her broken identity into two different people. It has a robotic and futuristic feel to it which is really modern so would be a good font to use to represent our modernised film noir/neo-noir.

I like the artist approach to this font. The brush strokes give the font a grunge look similar to the "Se7en" titles. It could also symbolise blood and finger printing which both compliment the Identity theme. Perhaps this would work better in a red font against a black background rather than the colours used here, to make it bolder and more meaningful with semiotics of danger and love.

I like these two fonts as they too express the theme of identity and have a 'grunge' feel. However I don't feel either of them are bold enough to be eye catching to an audience. It's also not very modern and looks too positive to convey a detective-drama type film.

These two are closest to be my favourite. The fonts look grungy, mysterious and spooky. Although it has traits of delivering a horror genre, I feel this would look good for our film as it follows a detective-drama storyline with twists and a manipulative femme fatale. This font would look equally effective in a red-on-black background too.

I decided to try something a little different but still using the same application. Here I used a photograph of my eye taken on a Canon DSLR. I uploaded a white font and reduced the transparency. This is just to get a feel of some design ideas either for our institution logo or for my personal ancillary tasks. I used an eye as iris recognition is a form of identity and thus complies with our title. 

As aforementioned in my video, I said I was going to experiment with decadent fancy fonts. I'm undecided on how I feel about this font as its very different to the typical bold fonts I've been using. I still think it's effective but I'm not sure as of yet if its strong enough to convey our genre of film noir and identity.

I really like this typewriter replica font. It's a cross between traditional and neo-noir and definitely works well with our theme. The red font has semiotics of danger, death and love which could in effect be relatable to our narrative. This is another key favourite as it's extremely bold and eye catching for the viewers.

This font was chosen from inspiration from the film 'Zodiac'. I like the modernised square design of each letter and again, this is a really bold, memorable font. If we were to use red as our colour theme I would make sure we use a much more vivid, blood like red ans this has orangey tones which aren't as bold.

What conventions does our Noir "Identity" follow?

I created two word clouds using Tagxedo for a creative way of visually presenting a blog post of conventions conformed to and subverted to within our film noir.

SUBVERTED. So e.g. we have a FEMALE PROTAGONIST rather than the typical male protagonist you see in film noirs

And these are the typical conventions that we do follow

Coming up with our Institution name - "ALLURING ANIMATIONS"

For the three of us, myself, Ellie Morphew and Olivia Gascoine, we wanted to create a film institution name and logo to be able to integrate logos into our ancillary tasks, other documents on our blog and to produce a short animation for the opening of our film. This aids professionalism and will portray a more convincing film to our viewers. As we are going along with a modernised 1940s glamour theme for our character Blake, we wanted to continue this into our personal institution. In the end we came up with a joint favourite of 'Alluring Animations'. Alluring has connotations of glamour; enticing, enganging, intriguing, alerting, obtaining, reeling in and grabbing the attention of our audience so we feel this is an apt choice. We chose 'animations' rather than other common words like productions, as the alliteration is catchy and effective and thus will make our viewers remember our name. Again we created this very short presentation on Animoto as we felt the Audience Profile video worked well on it, as well as looking sleek and easy to construct. Next we aim to produce written designs and finally, computed designs of our institution logo.

Audience Research - Questionnaire. How to reach our audiences?

Created using Google Documents, we put together this questionnaire which we feel best caters for answers that will help us shape, alter and target our film noir. We want to see how different genders and age groups feel about films in general and film noirs specifically too. Too make sure we don't get any  biased questions with questionees that get bored or confused, we have varied our question styles and response types as well as making sure we including non-film noir related questions too. Once we have received a considerable amount of answers, we will analyse the data and post it to our blogs. 
We used social networking to obtain answers from our friends and we are also going to email people of other ages such as relatives so that we can create a non-biased, wide pool of answers from a range of demographic groups.

Audience Profile - what sort of people do we want to target a film at?

Above animation created using Animoto, a free online video service which combines music, text, videos onto a stylised template.

Screenshots and extended details, as the animation is quite fast paced.

We have described the narrative of 'Identity' to be a 'detective-drama' which both conforms and subverts typical film noir conventions.

We have listed Identity as having a BBFC rating of 15 as it follows the stated rules and  regulations.

To widen our audience pool we want to target both males and females. We also want to aim for couples or friend groups of 20-30 years old, perhaps budding young entrepreneurs.

We are targeting the ABC1 demographic as this widens our audience pool further and prevents any bias by including all social classes.

We ideally want to approach and advertise our ancillary tasts (posters and magazine reviews) as well as our film as a whole, to fans of short, detective-dramas, new AND old film noir watchers.

"For audiences who like to actively consume a media text, engage with an enigma and follow a fast pace chase." Sums up our intentions of the Identity narrative very accurately.

"For audiences who can relate/recognise the husting city of London. Audeince may be business professionals, university students or parents."